


Rubus ulmifolius

by brigitttt



Series: Ipheion uniflorum [4]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Museum, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Past Child Sexual Abuse, In-depth Research on Flora and Fauna of Fictional Countries, M/M, Taxidermy, bonding with your boyfriend's supervisor's son, they're in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 20:53:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19092931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigitttt/pseuds/brigitttt
Summary: Set a year and a half after the events of Ipheion uniflorum/a year after Merops apiaster. Laurent and Damen go up to Vere and deal with entanglement.





	Rubus ulmifolius

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for coming on this journey of an au that I started literally only 7 months ago, this was an amazing experience and challenge to write and I'm so glad I did it; over 65k of museum/academia-based fools being in love. Sadly this is probably going to be it for these two dweebs in this universe, I must move on to other tendernesses. Please enjoy, I love you. (As always, special thanks to my lavender: jay/thatgothlibrarian)

“My supervisor asked if I wanted to go up to northern Vere for a week,” Damen says one night, as he’s washing the dishes after dinner.

Laurent had been searching the top cupboard for a hidden package of scones, but drops down from his toes at Damen’s quiet announcement. He squints at where the wood of the cabinet meets the ceiling and deciphers what exactly Damen is trying to say.

“It would just be to help her with some field work,” he continues, scrubbing softly at a bowl. “And maybe check out the museum collections on the way there and back.” Laurent still hasn’t made any indication he’s listening but Damen knows him well enough. Laurent hears the bowl being put down and feels eyes on his back. 

“Oh? When was she planning,” says Laurent, keeping the tone light. He turns around slowly to find, as he expected, a searching, hesitant look on Damen’s face. “It can get quite nice up there in the fall,” he says, affecting a polite demeanor.

Damen ignores his attempts at nonchalance. “She said I should invite you along.” Laurent raises his eyebrows and Damen closes his eyes. “I know, I know, I didn’t want to make you feel like you _had to_ come with. Colette doesn’t care,” he says, and then makes a face. Laurent nods absentmindedly, and turns back to the cupboard to close it. 

Laurent thinks maybe he should be more happy that he’s been invited on their trip. It’s a given that Damen will go; this is his degree and his field and his passion, and he would never pass up the chance to tramp around the northern countryside and collect data on stoats or weasels or what-have-you with his supervisor. Laurent avoids identifying what it is that sparks his reluctance to join them, but quietly admits that if it had been anywhere else, he would have hesitated less. He leans back against the counter.

“I’ll see if I have any loose ends at work,” he says as noncommittally as possible. Damen puts the last plate on the drying rack and shoots him a smile. His eyes are practically twinkling. “That’s not a yes,” Laurent warns, but he trips out of the kitchen before Damen can catch his blush.

#

In an effort to leave the best impression he can on Laurent’s mornings, Damen drops him off at the museum on the way into campus nearly every day. He argues that it saves them both heaps on gas and motivates him to get to work in the department early, but it also means that Laurent spends a lot of his time after breakfast just waiting for Damen to get his act together. One notable morning, Laurent waited patiently with a cup of coffee at the table for just over an hour so that Damen could find a clean pair of jeans, search for where he left his jacket, get distracted by a bird out the bedroom window, eventually find his jacket, and then toast a bagel, all before they left in the car, breakfast precariously clutched in one hand as he held the steering wheel with the other. 

This morning is not quite so hectic. They’re about a block away from the museum, looking for a spot to pull over, when Damen straightens in the driver’s seat and clears his throat. Laurent looks at him expectantly, his elbow propped casually against the window.

“Colette said she might bring her kid,” Damen says cryptically. “So you wouldn’t be the only one. If you decide to come, I mean.” 

Laurent narrows his eyes. “I’m not babysitting your supervisor’s offspring for over a week in the countryside, Damen.” 

“He wouldn’t need – he’s sixteen or something, you wouldn’t have to look after him. Oh, hell yeah,” he says, squeezing the car into the last open spot along the street. He puts the car in park and shifts in his seat to face him; Laurent swears he feels the car bounce with the motion. “I know you have your reasons to not want to go up there, but I think it could be really nice.” Damen reaches over into Laurent’s lap to hold his hand, as if to emphasise how nice it could be, if they faced Laurent’s home province together. Laurent sighs. 

“Whatever will you do without me beside you for seven, whole, entire, lonely days,” he says, and laughs at Damen’s resulting pout. “I told you, I’ll think about it.” He leans over into Damen’s space to peck his cheek, but Damen doesn’t let him go that easily, bringing a quick hand up to cup his face while he directs Laurent’s kiss to his mouth. Laurent sighs into it – the soft lips, the coffee on his breath – it’s still a dream, after almost two years, and he hopes it never feels any different. 

Damen rolls down the passenger window once Laurent’s out of the car, and makes him lean over to listen to Damen say “Have a good day! I love you,” with a beautiful, dimpled smile before he drives off. Laurent adjusts the strap of his bag on his shoulder and heads to the museum’s side entrance.

Nicaise arrives closer to half past ten, hugging his light jacket tightly around his middle. Laurent doesn’t question it when he unwrap it to pull out a plastic pot filled with dirt and some small pinkish-purple flowers, and puts it down on the desk.

“You know when your beast of a boyfriend brought those flowers in? How the _fuck_ –” Nicaise stamps his foot, “– did he get it past security?! Those assholes kept saying all this shit about bringing foreign contaminants into the collections!” He collapses on the only swivel chair in the office with a huff. “As if I’d put specimen-eating bugs in _my_ plant that I brought _from my home_. I had to sneak in through the gross warehouse door and ask that one fit exhibit builder for his keycard.” Laurent laughs through his nose and looks closer at the pot’s inhabitant.

“A cyclamen,” he says, not really for confirmation, but Nicaise nods anyways. The petals are a very soft pastel purple, lined in a delicate off-white. The leaves are prettily variegated but the stems seem to be drooping. 

“It’s a _purpurascens_ ,” says Nicaise. “I got him from a sale at the shop by my apartment but he hates me, apparently.” Laurent frowns and touches a finger gently to one of the flowers. Nicaise hasn’t explicitly asked for help taking care of the plant but Laurent can tell that this is as polite a request he’ll get. 

“He either hates you, or he hates his plastic flower shop pot,” Laurent says, treading carefully. Nicaise glares at him from underneath his eyelashes. “I didn’t think your cat authorized anything this colour in the apartment anyways.”

“Whatever,” says Nicaise haughtily, looking away. “Some people just don’t have time for all the dicking around you do.” He’s been like this more and more recently, moody and then pulling away. There’s been less of the teasing and more of the thorns, and it’s been too long since they first met that Laurent sometimes forgets how to not get pricked by them. He brushes them off every time, because he’s an adult and he knows it’s nothing personal and Nicaise keeps coming in to volunteer, but Laurent also genuinely cares about Nicaise. He wouldn’t be so cheesy as to say the words “kindred spirit” but he can’t help but notice each instinctive facet that he observes in Nicaise that could’ve been mirrored, paralleled by his own youth. Laurent just doesn’t think it’ll ever be an appropriate time to broach that sort of subject. 

He doesn’t respond to Nicaise’s snark, regardless. They end up at the long table under the windows in the main collections room, sifting through the specimens a researcher had been looking at the day before, preparing them for reshelving. It’s quiet work, and so the text message that alerts Laurent’s usually silenced phone surprises him more than usual. He ignores Nicaise’s nosy look as he digs it out of his pocket.

It’s from Damen: ‘ _for when you ask your boss for time off_ ,’ followed by the prospective field work dates. Laurent holds his breath before he can sigh out loud again, and closes his phone without replying. He hasn’t taken vacation days for a long while, so there really wouldn’t be a problem if he took the time off. It’s frustrating that Damen is still treating it like it’s a sure thing that Laurent will accompany him up to Vere, but he can almost guess where Damen is trying to come from with this, that Laurent just has to stop thinking and do it. Maybe that’s the more irritating part. Laurent picks up the next specimen card and holds it in his hands, unseeing.

“Are you fighting?” asks Nicaise, and then he shrugs to himself and turns back to the specimen on the table in front of him. “Not that I care.” Laurent bites down on a smile.

“Don’t strain yourself. Damen’s just been asking me to go up to Vere with him for a bit,” Laurent says. He can see Nicaise’s interest pique out of the corner of his eye.

“Where in Vere?”

“Some museums around Arles, then somewhere between Belloy and Varenne for field work. It’s with his university supervisor,” he says, and then internally cringes at how dull it makes them sound. After the summer in Ios they really haven’t gone anywhere or done anything very interesting by anyone’s standards.

“Sounds awful,” Nicaise retorts immediately. Laurent watches him chew his lip for a couple seconds before Nicaise asks, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice, “Do you know anyone in Arles?”

The question should make Laurent tense his shoulders, or feel a twinge of grief behind his eyes. He considers saying something equivocal, something that Nicaise might scoff at but not fight, but instead his body feels like a heavy solid weight against the chair, and his answer is just as substantial. “No, there’s no one there,” he says.

Nicaise still scoffs, and Laurent is almost relieved at the predictable response. “Didn’t think so,” he says at normal volume, with an air of pure popularity and worldliness. With a steady hand, Laurent picks up the next specimen.

#

It’s admittedly a strange time to be focused on something like this, but Laurent can’t help but be fascinated by the pinch of Damen’s eyebrows when his face is overcome with pleasure, mouth agape and breath ragged, those long, dark eyelashes fanned out on his cheeks. He wants to smooth a finger along the crease there, not to get rid of it, but just to . . . he’s not sure, maybe just to feel it, acknowledge that it’s a real thing he can touch. Laurent is reminded of the absurdity of these thoughts when Damen’s hands squeeze his hip and spread his ass just before a considerably harder thrust. Laurent closes his eyes again and rolls his hips down in a slightly faster rhythm, just to make up for his distraction.

He likes riding Damen more than any other position, as they found out over the last year. There’s something about controlling when exactly Damen hits his prostate, whether Damen can hold him close or let Laurent sit back, how fast or slow Laurent can set the pace. It’s still terribly vanilla of them, but it’s also perfect, and Laurent relaxes into the motion of it with blissful ease every time. 

Damen pants Laurent’s name a couple times like an invocation, rubbing a bleary hand up and down the front of his hip as it bounces. Laurent lets out a tiny whine through his teeth and presses his weight further onto where his own hands are propped on the muscle of Damen’s shoulders, feeling the hand on his ass tighten mindlessly. Laurent flinches, unable to stop the reaction, but Damen must not have noticed and – it’s actually better this time, to not get snagged and cling on to the memory but instead continue to be washed away by the rest of the sensations around him. 

Damen gasps a senseless mixture of yes-es and Laurent’s name, straining his head back as if to burrow further into the pillows, baring the smooth brown expanse of his neck to Laurent as a result. The hand on his ass thankfully slides down to rest at the crease of Laurent’s knee, where it’s folded next to Damen’s side, and the muscles of Laurent’s thighs flex in a well-worn groove as he rolls and grinds and fucks himself on Damen’s dick. A sharp thrust from Damen suddenly hits Laurent right in that brilliant spot and he makes a helpless noise while Damen hums a closed-mouthed moan.

“I don’t wanna come yet,” Laurent says in between breaths, but he barely means it, only says it in the way that he doesn’t want this feeling to end, the feeling of Damen’s caresses and natural cherishing. He can’t stop himself from leaning in towards the idle, satisfied smiles that Damen gives him, practically all the time, too. Damen groans at Laurent’s words and holds him higher up, by the bottom of his ribcage.

“I can’t – I’m gonna –” Damen stammers out and then he presses his hips up firmly into Laurent’s, and if it wasn’t for the condom Laurent is sure he would feel him coming and for some reason that gets him more hot than ever, the thought of it dripping out of him when they’re finished, the same way saliva and come smear across Damen’s lips after he sucks Laurent off, and it’s all he can do to throw a hand down to his own cock just before he comes too, Damen still pressing intensely on him from the inside. Laurent opens his eyes after a minute of breathlessness and twitches of aftershock to see his own come across Damen’s belly and lets out a last small, shaky moan at the feeling of Damen’s hand running low along his back.

Laurent more tips over rather than pulls off of Damen, who inhales sharply at the movement; Laurent feels less than guilty about it, melting into the bedclothes as Damen ties off the condom and cleans himself up. He allows Damen to hand him a washcloth, and then a pair of briefs and his sleep shirt, before pulling on Damen’s arm to get him to turn off the lamp and relax into bed. He rests his cheek on Damen’s chest to feel the soft raising and lowering of each breath, and thinks about nothing but how utterly tired he is, how magnificent the pull of sleep feels after such exertion. 

Laurent feels Damen’s chest rise to take a breath and then pause; Damen opens his mouth.

“No,” Laurent whispers plaintively into the hair by Damen’s nipple. He feels a light hand on the back of his shoulder.

“I’m sorry I keep asking about the field work stuff. I just –” Damen pauses to yawn, and Laurent represses the urge to bite the dark skin in front of his mouth. “It feels like we never get to do real things together anymore, now I’m back in school. Yes, stop that, I know we live together, I just – I don’t want this to become . . . stagnant? Does that even make sense?”

Laurent stops pinching Damen’s breast to fully, albeit sleepily, consider what Damen’s attempting to communicate. It all begins to be elucidated under this new information: Damen still has a lot of the same insecurities he came to Marlas with two years ago, even if they’re not a direct result of current events. Laurent blurrily remembers the explanation of Damen’s relationship with Jokaste, and realises how similar the situation might seem to Damen right now, even just subconsciously. He’s doing a PhD this time, instead of a master’s, and he’s dating Laurent the Museum Employee instead of Jokaste the Museum Employee, who he probably doesn’t need reminding are two different people with slightly different relationship priorities. Laurent thinks about that word, ‘ _stagnant_ ’, though, and how it must feel to be in a partnership with someone you love but only see in certain settings, with certain parameters. He thinks about how Damen didn’t see it coming when Jokaste broke up with him. How many field excursions had he invited her on that she had lovingly declined?

“Nevermind, we can talk about this some –” Damen starts, at the same time Laurent says, “It does makes sense.” Damen shifts above him, and Laurent feels like he should look up through the dark to face him, so he does. 

“It makes sense,” he says again, and then doesn’t know how to go on. “Just the way you phrased it when you – it would mean a lot to you if I joined you, wouldn’t it,” and even if Laurent can’t see Damen nodding, he can feel it. Laurent doesn’t say anymore, laying his head back down and running his free hand over and back along Damen’s chest. He’ll probably firmly push away the majority of his childhood memories and say yes to the trip in the morning, and it seems like Damen knows this now, too.

#

Laurent walks into the lobby of the Marlas University zoology department building near midday on his day off, to the familiar sight of greenery overhanging the balconies of each floor into the atrium. He dodges past a couple undergrads loitering after a lecture and then stops.

There’s a large glass case near the middle of the floor that’s usually filled with a standard circulation of student-related objects. There had been corals here for the past month, for some ocean research group, and the month before had had a display about human evolutionary genetics. When Laurent had come in last week it had been empty, apparently in preparation for . . . Damen’s museum-grade skins. 

As Laurent walks slowly over to the display case, the scope of it sinks in; there are about eight or ten each of at least five different kinds of animals, from common field mice to exotic finches. Laurent wonders vaguely if he’s just being ridiculous and attributing every flawless preparation job he sees to his boyfriend, but no, there’s a card in the corner with Damen’s full name, and a general-knowledge description of what skins are used for and how they’re made. There aren’t any Delpha Museum tags on the specimens, and Damen’s been going steadily into campus every day, so there must be a lab here he made them in. Laurent is struck with the strange feeling that he doesn’t really know what Damen does anymore, now that they’re not working in the same building. He knows Damen’s PhD is something to do with the Artesian brown bear, and that he collects data from museums, nature conservancies, and wildlife records, and he lets Damen talk at him most nights if something thrilling comes up in his research, but Laurent suddenly senses the disconnect that’s arisen since Damen started his program. Maybe this is what he had been worried about when he’d said ‘ _stagnant_ ’.

He’s taken long enough in the lobby that Laurent can feel the takeout cup in his hand losing its heat, so he hurries to take the stairs up to Damen’s floor. He passes by the usual array of conference research posters and bulletin boards in the hallways, bypassing cabinets with older and much less vibrant taxidermy mounts along the way. The office door is slightly ajar, and when Laurent quietly pushes it open, he sees that both Damen and one of his officemates are hunkered over Damen’s desk, looking at something on the computer. Damen glances up and shoots Laurent a smile.

“Hey, thanks,” says Damen when Laurent hands him the cup. “Marc and I were just going over this draft, but we won’t take too much longer. You can sit in Sami’s chair if you like,” he says, gesturing to the second officemate’s desk. Laurent sits gingerly, overly aware of his own presence in this yet unknown individual’s personal space. According to Damen, they work exclusively at night, and Damen sees them only in passing as they arrive and he leaves, like Sami is some kind of cryptid.

It’s a cosy room, to say the least. An internal window behind Damen’s desk looks out into the atrium and lets in some natural light through the glass building front, and Laurent knows that you can open the window and lean your head out to see hanging plants cascade down to the lobby below. The rest of the office is taken up by the three main desks, and shelves all along the walls, informally subdivided between the three residents. There’s a couple of big mineral-rich rocks on the shelf directly above Marc’s desk, and some 3D-printed bird skulls dotted around Sami’s. The corner of Damen’s desk has a slightly fatigued potted plant that Laurent’s sure he’ll be asked to help revive sooner or later, tucked up against a stack of textbooks that Damen’s supervisor has presumably provided to him. Other than journals and other papers, there’s a small, wonky picture frame on the shelf directly above the desk that Laurent avoids looking at; it’s a picture of the two of them they’d taken down in Ios, with Damen’s arm thrown around Laurent’s shoulders, smiling brilliantly while Laurent squints into the sun with an awkward expression. Laurent feels his skin get uncomfortably warm every time he looks at it, and he’ll never tell Damen how much he hates the way he looks in it, an ugly ghost next to Damen’s warm exuberance. 

Damen and Marc continue to mutter to each other about certain phrases and the placement of figures for the next couple minutes, until Marc stands upright again, leaning back with a hand on his hip and a satisfied look. Damen takes a sip of his drink and smiles with his eyes at Laurent over the rim of the cup; Laurent has to look down to hide his blush. Just that morning, Laurent had briefly woken up at 7:15 to a soft kiss on his forehead and a quiet murmur of affection before Damen left for campus. He feels like Damen does so much for him in all these tiny instances of adoration, and considers, not for the first time and not for the last, whether he does enough to let Damen know Laurent feels the same way. 

They pass by the display of Damen’s work on the way out of the building, but it’s only when they get to a small cafe near the centre of campus that Laurent decides that he wants to bring it up. 

“You seem hard at work, nowadays,” he says, affecting nonchalance while he picks at the barley in his soup with the plastic spoon. He looks up only to see Damen attempt an amused look of calculation around a mouthful of roast beef wrap. Laurent ducks his gaze down to his bowl again.

“Yeah, but it’s all fun,” Damen says when he swallows. Laurent can practically feel the warm brown stare he knows is trained on him. “Anything on your mind?”

That’s the question, isn’t it. Damen says it easily, and the general bustle of the cafe around them eats up any real conversation, and when does Laurent not have something on his mind? He looks up under his brow at Damen, this unreasonably gorgeous man who waits and listens. Damen pushes his hair back off his forehead with the comb of his fingers, and gifts Laurent with a small, relaxed smile.

“No,” Laurent says with an exhale. Damen’s smile widens imperceptibly. Laurent eats another spoonful of soup before clearing his throat. “I saw your skins in the lobby – they look nice,” he says. He wants to recoil at the tone of his voice after he says it; like he’s jealous of Damen’s work, like the birds and rodents are his competition for Damen’s affection. Laurent closes his mouth in a firm line and tries to breathe naturally, focussing on the wide slope of Damen’s nose.

“Oh yeah, you saw them?” Damen bounces in his seat like a puppy. “Colette said something to the department heads and they asked if I could cook something up for them,” he says, and Laurent doesn’t stop himself from wrinkling his nose at the phrasing. Damen laughs. “There were a bunch of things in the lab freezer already so it wasn’t a big deal.”

Laurent automatically nods and uncrosses his legs under the table. “You’re a big deal,” he says quietly, on instinct, incomprehensible even to himself, and stands up to pack away the trash of their lunch. Damen leads the way out of the cafe and Laurent is content to follow in the cleared path. The autumn sun is bright but becoming cooler; the coastal positioning of the city of Marlas seems to even everything out, with winter chill not as cold as it is further north, and summer heat not as hot as it is further south. It’s temperate and pleasant, and Laurent doesn’t particularly miss the heavy snowfall or muted sun from his childhood.

Once they’re on the sidewalk back to the department building, Damen grabs up Laurent’s hand and swings it once between them before Laurent’s arm stiffens to keep their joined hands still. Damen only laughs and acquiesces, rubbing his thumb over Laurent’s and tilting his head up to the sun with closed eyes. It reminds Laurent of a sunflower, or maybe a daffodil, although the word _Narcissus_ is not really an immediate parallel to thoughts of Damen. 

“Hey,” Damen says softly, squeezing his hand once. Laurent squints into the sunlight behind Damen and tries not to sneeze. 

“Hi,” Laurent says back, once it becomes oddly apparent that Damen’s waiting for a response. He smiles at Laurent with most of his teeth, dimple appearing on his cheek.

“Should I get a tattoo?” The question is absurd and sudden enough that Laurent chokes out a bewildered laugh.

“What? Why?” Laurent searches his memory for whether he’s ever seen a tattoo anywhere on Damen already and realises with strange surprise that he’s coming up empty. Apparently his sun-blinded face doesn’t hide his thought process well enough.

“You’ve seen me naked how many times and you still had to remember if I already had one, didn’t you,” Damen says with a laugh. “And I dunno. Colette has tattoos.”

“So does Nicaise, and Pallas, and also everyone else in the natural sciences,” Laurent retaliates, and then he looks at Damen’s smirk and pauses, stammers out, “ _Except_ me. You’ve seen me naked, remember?”

“How could I forget,” Damen says with a wistful air, until Laurent tries to wriggle his hand out of his grip. “It was just a thought, anyways. I thought you might have opinions,” he says enigmatically. 

Laurent frowns and focuses on the steps he and Damen take in tandem along the pavement, one out of every ten or so. The department building looms up tall down the road in front of them, and they’ll have to part ways for the afternoon.

“It’s your body,” Laurent says with indifference, shrugging a shoulder. Damen hums, and attempts to swing their hands again, and Laurent lets him this time. It’s hard sometimes, to deny Damen the kind of carefree, casual affection that he spontaneously gives to Laurent out in the open, where anyone could see. He’s still afraid to let slip too much, like if he blurts out the quantity of love he holds in his chest for Damen that it’ll never be recalled back, and he’ll be empty again. But no, it wouldn’t be lost, would it, all his inner feelings would be with Damen, and maybe that’s what’s more scary, having it entirely in the hands of one person. 

Laurent shakes his head minutely, and looks at the snugly-spaced linden trees lining the sidewalk, yellowing leaves rustling against each other. Swinging their hands is not quite the sort of slope that leads to any of this, realistically, Laurent thinks, and they’ve already been together for so long that Damen probably knows all of this about him anyway, through some sort of osmosis, like a deep root taking in water.

When they stop outside the zoology building, Laurent can just barely see the lobby display case through the sunlit glass, and he turns around to Damen. He closes his eyes for a fraction of a second when Damen kisses his forehead, up high near his hairline, but then it’s over, and Damen grins back at Laurent while he makes his way back inside. 

#

It starts raining the day that they get the train into Vere, and if that doesn’t seem like a sign for the first time Laurent returns to Arles and its surroundings in the last nine years, he doesn’t know what is. 

He and Damen had fought last night too, over basically nothing. It hadn’t been big, but a plate had been cracked, and just as he’d leaned over the table to hiss a retort at Damen and the hairline break in the ceramic had formed under his hand, all the argument had rushed out of Laurent, leaving him suddenly exhausted and miserable. He’d retreated to the bedroom without another word, but later, in the small hours, Damen had lifted the covers and crawled into bed, and Laurent had woken up just enough to hear the whisper of Damen’s hair on the pillow, and a susurration of apology.

He sits in the seat beside Laurent now, head tilted out the window and an absent minded smile on his face, likely from the streaking flecks of rain on the train window; Laurent thinks that maybe Damen’s always been more appreciative of nature’s simple pleasures than he has, but then stops himself. It’s wrong, and he’s just anxious, and Damen would scoff, anyways, at the thought that they could have anything other than equal and considerable wonder for the natural world between them.

“Are you glad we left early,” he says instead, because isn’t that much more like him, to bring up with a smirk the exact argument they technically broke a plate over the night before. Damen only has time to roll his eyes with a laden smile before Colette and her son plop down into the seats facing in front of them. No wonder Damen likes her so much as a supervisor; they have similar ideas about timeliness – or lack thereof – when it comes to ticketed transport. The train's PA system sounds a chime to signal the start of movement, and the safety announcement comes on while Colette and her son get settled, shoving bags under seats and in the overhead beside Damen and Laurent’s own luggage. The bustle would be soothing to Laurent if he wasn't so secondhandedly nervewracked by how close they cut it with their boarding time.

“Hey, you guys are already here!” Colette says with a grin and a wide-handed gesture. Laurent bites down on his lip to stop from saying that it’s not hard to arrive earlier, and Damen laughs. He holds his hand out to Colette’s son with a grin; he does look about sixteen, as per Damen’s estimation, with the same wiry black curls as his mother and a fair complexion. Her family has lived in Delpha for many generations, soaking up many aspects of the culture-blending prevalent in the border province. She speaks with a regional accent, likely diminished over time by her years at school in Marlas, and has a lower voice than one would expect for a woman of her stature.

“This is Gabriel,” she introduces proudly, and Gabriel gives a smile closer to an embarrassed grimace when he shakes Damen’s hand, muttering a greeting into his own lap. Laurent can sympathise, and he folds his hands firmly in his lap before he pipes up.

“I’m Laurent. And it’s good to see you again, Colette,” he says, and tries not to look out of the corner of his eye at Gabriel’s reaction when Damen retracts his hand only to place it on Laurent’s knee. He thinks he might be holding his breath the entire time Colette talks about her excitement for the trip and the last week of her life. Laurent nods along genially at the conversation, but tenses inside when Damen’s thumb makes idle circles on his leg after he laughs back a reply. What does he have to worry about? Is some teenager’s opinion of his relationship worth that much to him?

It has to be Vere that’s doing this. With every mile that they approach Chastillon the grip around his lungs grows tighter, and he can’t stop from shifting in his seat. He’s long since pulled a book out of his bags for cover, but hasn’t turned a page yet, can’t absorb himself into the words. Damen’s gone back to staring out the window, too susceptible to motion sickness to read papers like Colette, or scroll through his phone like Gabriel. Laurent digs his back into the seat when the train slows and the Chastillon station starts rolling past the window. He grips his armrest tightly when Colette straightens and asks cheerily if they’re excited for the museum.

The grandiose building is just as he remembers, with purely decorative columns, and doorways designed in the style favoured by many pompous Veretian architects of the classical era. Damen hovers close by as they enter the museum behind Colette, in the way he does that seems to ask for as much public intimacy as Laurent’s willing to give, but the increasingly rotten feeling in the pit of Laurent’s stomach only makes him shove his hands further down into his jacket pockets, and harden his gaze at the displays visible in the atrium. 

The current Chastillon museum reflects how enormously occupied the area had been for hunting in its long history of royal Veretian use. The woods around have remained somewhat intact, but some industry must have found enough of a land-use loophole to cut down a lot of it, and even more since Laurent was last here. The exhibits inside are all very hunting-oriented as well, with uncountable numbers of taxidermied game collected from estates around the area, including the old Chastillon castle. Laurent’s spine stiffens more the further they go in, and he can’t keep his hands from trembling in his pockets as they pass by the smaller wall-mounts, glass eyes staring down on them all. Pheasants and partridge line the hallways to exhibits of smaller game, the foxes and badgers and hares, and then onto artificial scenes of stuffed mouflon and roe deer mounted on constructed mountain rocks. Laurent remembers being thirteen and fascinated by the leucistic fallow deer fawn specimen, too young to realize its relative rarity and the melancholy of its short life of singularity. 

Colette’s been keeping up a running commentary of the minutiae of the exhibits, encouraged by occasional questions from Damen as they pass through room after room of animals, educational signage, and the intermittent display on hunting equipment. Laurent can’t hear any of it, feels only the crawling sensation on his skin that makes him want to get a thousand miles away from any human being and curl in on himself. The itch to shut down is worsened every time Damen throws a cautious, questioning smile in his direction and Laurent has to smile back, paste on a look of untroubled lightness so that he doesn’t ruin this field trip for his partner. Laurent so desperately doesn’t want to cause trouble but it’s agonizing when all he sees around every corner is a reminder of every time he was brought here after Auguste died.

The further in, the more impressive the exhibits become: chamois mounted as if perched on cliffs, red deer bucks poised to show off their impressive antlers, and of course, the terrible, hulking sanglier. The centrepiece of the big game room is a particularly horrible specimen, the huge curve of its shoulders following gnarly, coarse hair down to a snarl of a snout, stuck through with sharp tusks and a ghastly lump of an artificial tongue.

Laurent only makes it a couple small steps into the room before it all truly grips him, the sight of the monster that his uncle used to make him stand close in front of, hand wrapped around Laurent’s shoulder to guide him into looking at each individual horror on the beast: its shiny black hooves, its hard-edged nose. Laurent’s breath turns unfairly shallow, quick through his lungs, and his mouth holds fast in an unmistakably tight grimace. He can’t remember what he ate this morning but he feels his stomach threatening to turn it all back up, and then suddenly a thought comes to him and his eyes are compelled to scan over to Gabriel where he stands off to the other side of the boar from Colette, and something spiky lurches in his gut when he thinks, hideously and compulsively, “ _Too old_.” A hand slips into the nook of Laurent’s elbow and he shuts his eyes tight as he tries to stay perfectly, exquisitely still. 

It’s Damen’s voice that appears in his ear. “Are you okay?” Laurent’s eyes are still closed and it takes every ounce of effort in his body to shake his head back and forth, barely noticeable. The hand at his elbow retracts and a little more of his breath returns. He hopes distantly that Damen doesn’t attract attention to them; he doesn’t want to poison this experience for anyone else.

“We’re leaving this room,” Damen murmurs, and Laurent’s eyes open too quickly in his panic, spots forming in his vision from squeezing them shut too hard. This was what he was wishing against, it’s only his own problem, and Damen and the others should be able to stay and marvel over all the ugly trophies lining every square inch of this awful place. Laurent swallows down a lump in his throat and tries to protest.

“No, you shouldn’t have to –” he starts hoarsely, but then Damen is quietly edging into Laurent’s field of view, his eyes wide and brown and lined with beautifully dark eyelashes, blocking out any sight of the sanglier behind him.

“Colette’s taking us into the collections,” Damen says, and things make a bit more sense; Laurent hasn’t ruined anything with his panic, this is just what the plan was all along. In Laurent’s momentary distraction, Damen has reached forward again to trace small, reassuring circles onto his hand, and Laurent doesn’t even look around to see if anyone’s watching before bringing his free hand up to the front of Damen’s shirt, briefly, just to touch something real and soft and warm. He leaves his other hand in Damen’s as they turn around to an inconspicuous door in the corner of the room, Colette holding it open and Gabriel leaning against the wall, busy looking at something on his phone.

Laurent can feel his heartbeat returning to him as he follows Damen down the corridor to the collections. The clicking shut of the door to the sanglier exhibit was too inconsequential to really equal the amount of relief that came with leaving it behind, so Laurent concentrates instead on the echo of their footsteps down the fluorescent-lit hallway, and Damen’s hand wrapped around his own. Likely, the walk down the narrow corridor lasts for less than a minute but it feels extended, like a rubber band stretching time around them, and Laurent almost runs into Damen’s back when they reach the end of it.

Through a couple more doorways and down a half-stairway, their little troupe reaches a door labelled with a small plaque that simply says _Mammifères_. Laurent realises that he’s going to have to release Damen’s hand so that he and Colette can do some work, but doesn’t end up letting go until the last second possible, before Laurent turns down an aisle of double-stacked metal cabinets. He opens a door every so often to observe the carefully stored skins inside each tray, starkly coloured under the fluorescents.

#

Damen doesn’t say anything about what happened in Chastillon until later that night. 

They’d hauled their bags over to the car rental place, and then set out across Belloy towards the field station on the border of Varenne. They’d bypassed Arles on the way, skirting south of it, and Laurent had curled his legs up in the backseat next to Damen, who had graciously allowed Gabriel the leg room of the passenger seat in exchange for pointing out to Laurent all the sheep and horses they passed by. His hand had laid lightly on top of Laurent’s, unconsciously shifting it with each occasional excitement of a recognizable bird flying overhead. 

Laurent had kept mostly silent, acknowledging Damen’s quiet announcements of animals but also wandering through his own thoughts of Northern Vere’s relatively contemporary preference for agriculture, favouring deforestation and grazing land and precise hedgerows over native plants and expansive, ancient oak forests. When Damen had asked what he was thinking about, Laurent had merely shrugged and closed his eyes, and thought about whether the weavers of the Delfeur Tapestries back in Marlas could ever have predicted this future, one in which kings and horse riders vanished into the deepest part of the woods, and then perished along with the trees before they could emerge again. Laurent had fallen into an uneasy nap for the rest of the ride, only waking up to eat the sandwich put in his hands a half hour before they pull into the park lands. 

The field station is technically managed by the University of Arles, but primarily owned through the Veretian government itself, with the intention of supplying shelter for researchers during the off-season, and park rangers during the more popular spring and summer months. It’s fully stocked with easily preservable food, and has a small library of local wildlife books on the shelves above the dining table, which is also home to a microscope that looks about sixty years old. There are only three bedrooms, and Colette is lax enough to let Damen and Laurent have one together, chirping ‘ _bôna nuet_ ’ at them with a smile before tossing Gabriel’s bags through the doorway next to her own room. Damen quirks his mouth into a grin and sits down heavily on the bed after Laurent closes the door behind him, the bedsprings protesting noisily. 

“Colette talks funny sometimes, doesn’t she,” Damen comments idly in Akielon as he pats the quilt under his hands. Laurent finds a good place on the floor to put his bag before squatting down to open it.

“She’s just East-Delphan,” Laurent says, quickly finding his toothbrush. “They have their own dialects over there.”

“It just sounds more Veretian than Akielon is all,” Damen says. He goes quiet for a moment behind Laurent, although the bed squeaks again when he stands up. He joins Laurent at the small sink in the corner of the room and Laurent eyes him in the mirror while he brushes his teeth. Damen gives him puppy-dog eyes and smushes his mouth on the collar of Laurent’s shirt, washing the skin there in a warm exhale. His hands land gently on Laurent’s sides. 

Laurent narrows his eyes at him. “I don’t think so.” His mouth is unfortunately too foamy with toothpaste to achieve the tone of objection he wants. He leans over to spit and Damen’s hands shift down to his hipbones.

“You don’t think she sounds more Veretian?” Damen’s eyes glint in his reflection and Laurent reaches for the towel to wipe his mouth.

“I don’t think what you’re hoping will happen on that creaky mattress is going to happen,” Laurent replies, although his voice is not as cold as it could be. He can feel Damen’s crotch on his butt now, but can’t tell if the hardness he feels there is Damen’s arousal or just the zipper and denim of the fly of his jeans.

“And what am I hoping will happen?” says Damen lowly, tickling the small hairs on Laurent’s neck, his nose nudging behind Laurent’s ear. Laurent shivers reflexively but the feeling isn’t nice, suddenly, it’s uncomfortable, and for a flash of a second Damen’s breath on his skin makes him want to recoil. Laurent places his hands over Damen’s and digs in a little, hoping that the pressure will bring him back, will get him on the same page again, but all it does is make his skin crawl even more. He fumbles a shove at Damen’s hands and slides out from between Damen and the sink in a quick motion, pressing his back to the wall. 

“Laurent –” Damen starts, but Laurent shakes his head. 

“Don’t. I’m – tired,” Laurent says flimsily. Damen’s too smart to buy the excuse, but he allows the ensuing silence to extend for the rest of their preparations for bed, brushing teeth and changing into sleep shirts and shucking off shoes and jeans. The lights are out and they’ve been laying on their respective sides, untouching, for five minutes before Damen even rolls over and clears his throat. Laurent tenses for the worst, expecting all the same kinds of questions that he’s been carefully avoiding in his own mind for the whole day, ones like ‘Why are you like this?’ and ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and ‘What are you so afraid of?’

“I don’t know what to say, Laurent,” Damen says instead, and it’s so surprising it makes Laurent let out a breath of a laugh. He feels Damen curl his legs up under the sheets.

“Then you don’t have to say anything,” Laurent whispers back, half hoping that he’s too quiet to hear.

He feels Damen’s arm shift towards him. “I just – I love you,” he says softly. “I want to know all the right things to say and do, so that you can be happy.” Laurent wills himself not to squirm, and purses his lips together instead. “You really weren’t okay at all, at the museum, were you,” says Damen plainly yet without judgment, and Laurent had known it was coming but wishes he hadn’t. 

Damen’s hand feels a hairsbreadth away from Laurent’s arm now. “You know you can tell me, right? When you’re not okay?” and the way Damen says it, so profoundly quiet and close, like a bare and open thing, that’s what Laurent feels the most sharply. He turns his head away and closes his eyes; there’s nothing to see in the darkness anyways.

“You can’t know everything, and I can’t be happy all the time, and no, I wasn’t okay, but what does that word even mean, Damen?” Laurent says it all in a low rush. “Maybe my ‘okay’ is different from someone else’s ‘okay,’ from yours and Colette’s and – and Nikandros’ and Nicaise’s and everyone’s ‘okay,’ and maybe that’s just how my ‘okay’ functions.” He feels the weight of Damen’s arm move away against the mattress and decides that he doesn’t want that to happen. He grabs Damen’s hand in his own, blindly in the dark of the room, under the covers, his head turned away, but he finds it, like a magnet. Laurent takes a short breath, before he says, his voice unshiftingly strained, “I wasn’t alright, though. I just didn’t want you to know.”

Damen’s quiet for another minute, not even stroking his thumb over Laurent’s hand, merely resting his palm in the curve of Laurent’s. The weight of it is good, now. “Something like that just hasn’t happened for a while,” he says, and before Laurent can take a breath – to object? To defend? – Damen continues. “I notice at least some of the time, whether you want me to or not, Laurent. I’m sorry.” 

The finality of the apology sits in the air between them and Laurent really is tired, immaturely wishing that they didn’t need to have these conversations, that he didn’t have to talk at all, but now that he’s spilled out so much, rambled on about terms and laid things bare, he wants to compulsively fold it all back up again. He’s not sure how to reply, so he takes his own suggestion and doesn’t.

Damen shifts his weight on the bed again, eliciting a string of squeaks from the mattress springs that they both ignore. “Can I hold you?” he asks in a hush, but Laurent can already feel his face crumpling from physical and emotional exhaustion, all accumulated over the past 24-hours into something barely manageable to fall asleep to, so he shakes his head on the pillow, in the dark, but squeezes his grip around Damen’s hand, crushing their fingers together before letting out a breath and hoping that Damen understands. That’s what Laurent’s been doing for the past year anyways, isn’t it, hoping that Damen can figure him out enough for Laurent to get away with not voicing it himself. He’d thought they’d been getting better at this, but – there’s something about Vere, isn’t there, with its twisted, tusk-filled maw of a capital, that every inhabitant must both revere and wish to destroy. Laurent eventually falls asleep, hand gripped in Damen’s, and dreams about an embrace of branches, thorns pricking his skin. 

#

The next morning greets them early, grey light edging around the curtains of the little window to fill the room with a dull kind of wakefulness. Damen had gravitated closer to Laurent overnight, and is now curled up on his side, cradling nearly the whole length of Laurent’s arm in his embrace, up against his chest, hands cupped around his bicep, nose pressing gently into the flat of Laurent’s shoulder. 

Laurent tries to stretch somewhat in place to get the stiffness out of his joints from a whole night on his back, attempting to not to wake Damen as he does so. He’s not sure what time it is; there’s no clock in the room and the daylight is too muted from clouds and curtains to properly gauge what hour of morning it is. He feels enormously calm in this kind of liminal hour, so separate from the rest of the world that he can lift that weight from his shoulders for a moment with the knowledge that he won’t have to carry it again for at least a little while. It’s almost peaceful.

Damen’s face scrunches up against Laurent’s shoulder, and he realises suddenly that the hold Damen has his arm in effectively places Laurent’s hand nearly in Damen’s crotch. He freezes a little when Damen shifts his hips forward in sleep, and Laurent can feel the closeness and warmth next to his hand with stunning temptation. He wants to touch Damen, surprisingly enough after last night, and he thinks about how nice it might be to grip Damen through his briefs, stroke him softly awake and into hardness. Laurent’s eyes have closed again in his imaginings, and he lays for a moment in stillness, under the heavy blanket of exquisite anticipation before slowly rotating his wrist and smoothing his fingers over the curve of Damen’s upper thigh.

There’s a deep breath on Laurent’s shoulder and a kiss lands on the same spot after his arm has been squeezed gently in Damen’s grip. A slurred salutation rises up from there too, followed by another kiss, and Laurent doesn’t still his hand, only moves it down to where he had initially intended, ushering another quick exhale on his shoulder. Laurent closes his eyes again, just to listen to the tiny sounds Damen releases with each breath, and to feel everything else: the warmth under the quilt and of Damen’s hardening cock in his hand, the brush of Damen’s uncoordinated open lips and the scratch of stubble on Laurent’s skin, the occasional twitches of Damen’s hips with each slow pull Laurent makes. He slides his hand up only so far as it takes to reach the waistband of Damen’s briefs, so Laurent can slip inside to touch him skin-to-skin; Damen’s thumb starts to stroke the inside of Laurent’s elbow and he feels almost weightless now, tethered by this arm only to the ground, the rest of him detached and inconsequential, residing some place where nothing can touch him.

Damen comes with a soft gasp and a sharper thrust of his hips against Laurent’s grip, jolting his arm involuntarily and making the mattress let out a horrendous creaking noise with the motion. Laurent bites down on his lip and turns his head on the pillow towards Damen with wide eyes, only to meet the man stifling his own giggles in the crease of Laurent’s armpit. Laurent smiles then, and rubs his free hand down his face with a quiet laugh, heedful of the necessity for noiselessness. 

They regain some composure momentarily, and Laurent lets his hand fall from his face when he feels Damen kiss his way up from his armpit, detouring down to Laurent’s nipple before coming up to linger on the side of his neck. It’s the perfect remedy for the interruption of their languorous bliss, but just as Damen reaches Laurent’s face, hovering overtop with shuttered eyelids flicking between Laurent’s own gaze and his lips, Damen’s phone alarm goes off, making them both jump away. Damen scrambles to the little shelf beside the bed to turn it off and Laurent sits up, quilt and sheets pooling at his waist as he rubs his eyes with his clean hand and reminds himself that they’re here for research, to look at field mice or whatever and learn about . . . Laurent’s not sure, barely cares to be honest, but then Damen’s crawling halfway back onto the bed on his knees, leaning across to Laurent with intention in his dark eyes and Laurent’s face is being held in a hand still gentle from sleep. 

The kiss is nice, as they always are, and Laurent could’ve woken up with just this and still been satisfied. Damen tilts his head to the other side, and then pulls away to kiss Laurent’s cheek, and then the other one, and then he’s smiling that kind of smile that makes Laurent want to look away, it’s too much for one man to receive.

“Let’s find lots of voles today, sweetheart,” Damen whispers, and then laughs like an idiot at the disgusted, disappointed expression Laurent makes. 

#

Laurent decides that field work for zoology consists of far too much waiting around for his liking. After a quick but filling breakfast at the field station, they’d packed up sandwiches and granola bars in their backpacks, and hauled out a crate full of traps and bait from the station’s storage shed. Laurent had eyed the shiny metal of them warily, even when Colette had explained that they’re not for killing the animals. 

They tramp through fields, along a small worn path next to the brush, pausing every so often to check traps that have already been set up. Colette and Damen go off-path a couple of times to set up new traps, leaving Laurent and Gabriel to stand guard over the bags and gaze silently in different directions over the landscape. It’s rather quiet, apart from the rustle of the bushes and the slight wind through the grass. When they’re left alone for a third time, Damen throwing a smile over his shoulder before descending jauntily into the ditch, Laurent has the distinct feeling of being watched. After a fortifying breath, he turns his head sharply towards Gabriel, whose eyes widen almost comically in response. He has the maturity to look somewhat guilty, blushing and ducking his head so his curls hang onto his forehead. Laurent lets a trace of a smile creep onto his face.

“Sorry, I was just – uh,” Gabriel stammers, and then stops, swallowing his next words. It’s a little while before he regains his courage; Laurent spends the time peering over at the conifers lining the meadow, patiently wondering what kind of bird it is that’s chirping from there.

“Mum says you’re from Vere?” Gabriel asks eventually, in stilted, unpracticed Veretian. It’s clear he’s used to just speaking his mother’s Delphan dialect at home and Akielon at school, but it’s the kind of sincere gesture Laurent wouldn’t have thought of doing at Gabriel’s age. Laurent humours him, slowing down his own reply so it’s more easily parsed.

“I am, but Marlas is my home,” Laurent says. He gives Gabriel enough time to nod awkwardly and look away before asking, “Have you gone on many of these trips?”

Gabriel seems back on steadier conversational footing. “Yes, ever since I am a kid,” he says, accidentally missing the word to make his sentence grammatically correct in the past-tense. Laurent bites down a smile at the irony and nods, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. There’s a shout from the underbrush before either of them can say more, and Gabriel scrambles down into the gully with enthusiasm. Laurent follows more carefully.

Damen’s the one to exclaim to them as they approach that the ‘pitfall has a shrew!’, throwing his hands wide and accidentally catching his glove on a bramble with his gesticulation. Laurent’s brow furrows until he can see the plastic bucket set into the dirt and obscured by autumn leaf debris. Damen takes his hand to lead him over, and they peer down into it.

“I thought you said we were finding voles today,” Laurent says quietly, watching the shrew clamber around the layer of dirt on the bottom of the bucket. It’s cute, in a weird, tiny, animal way, and they all watch, engrossed, when Colette pulls out a mesh bag and her clipboard, and extracts the bucket from the ground. 

“We’re looking for both,” Damen replies, and then Laurent feels eyes on him again. “Having fun?”

Laurent watches Colette and Gabriel start the process of weighing and measuring the shrew, and it’s not until Colette puts the lid on the now empty bucket and puts it back in its hole that Laurent finally turns his head back to Damen, to look at the way his cheeks have acquired a rosy flush as well as the shine of the light through the dappled green of the bushes surrounding them. Damen’s mouth quirks and he gives Laurent a questioning look at his silence, his nose flaring a little with an exhale. Damen tears his eyes away from Laurent’s gaze at a rustle from the others; Colette must have released the shrew.

“Fun isn’t quite the word I’d use,” Laurent says eventually, earning a short laugh from Damen and a squeeze of his gloved hand around Laurent’s. They part the bushes to climb back up the short incline to the path, and emerge back onto the wide openness of the fields. 

The rest of the day continues on in much the same manner. Damen and Colette come across a couple more extant traps – not just pitfall bucket ones, but also those long metal corridors – and lay down some new ones of their own. The trek back to the field station is long but peaceful, and although he’s slightly bored, Laurent can see the appeal of this kind of work to someone interested in the data they’re collecting. He doesn’t bother asking Colette what she’s using the information on shrews and voles for; it’s almost more amusing to keep it a mystery and observe each catch they find with only his outsider’s judgment. They’re such small things, merely existing in nature, falling into traps but not sufficiently aware of the world outside of their immediate sphere of perception. Laurent revises his opinion about fieldwork: it would be much more boring to be the shrew than the one to study them.

After a simple dinner and a night’s rest, the next day progresses much the same. They start out checking the last laid traps, but then change directions after lunch to find older ones in a different area. Possibly at the urging of his mother, and more likely at the urging of Damen, Gabriel has taken to asking Laurent questions about various plants they come across as they walk the trails. Laurent’s surprised to find that he knows less of the flora in this area than he thought, and alters his answers to generalised statements rather than species names. Gabriel only nods along and hums in understanding, and then points to the next one. 

It’s at the end of that night, when he and Damen are resting in the dark under the blankets that Laurent receives a text message from Nicaise. He likely won’t be able to send anything back to the kid due to some mysterious aspect of technology that he doesn’t care enough about to figure out how to get around. There’s a picture attached that won’t load on his phone, but the message itself lends adequate context to be able to figure out that it’s of Nicaise’s cyclamen, thriving in a new pot. It all ends with ‘ _feel free to bring me back a present but don’t let your troll choose it_.’ Laurent smirks to himself. When he turns his head to show Damen he finds that his apparent troll is already asleep, lashes delicately fanned over his cheekbones, one hand shoved awkwardly under his own cheek, and torso twisted towards Laurent’s side of the bed.

Laurent can’t find sleep for a while after, and rather than trying to find a way to preoccupy his mind, he lets his thoughts whirl where they may. He thinks about Nicaise and his unwillingness to show weakness in the form of affection. He thinks about Gabriel and his enigmatic non-personality, about Colette and her gregarious confidence. Laurent thinks about himself, how knowing Damen and allowing him these pieces of himself has not made him as vulnerable as he thought it would, and he thinks about how Vere treats its children. Laurent lets himself drift off thinking about Auguste, and his parents, and their big house in Arles with its sublime gardens, trimmed roses and curated tulips, backed onto the forest that holds wild blueberries and tangly hawthorns.

#

“Good morning, Laurent! I was thinking,” greets Colette the next morning. He and Damen have just sat down for breakfast – a plate of toast already in the middle of the table, soon to be joined by the saucepan of beans Colette is taking off the stove. She gestures to Gabriel with her wooden spoon as he reaches for a piece of toast. “You and my life’s joy should go to the village this morning! Check out the sights!” It seems to be more than just a suggestion.

“ _Mamá_ ,” Gabriel starts to whine, before stopping himself. He says a quick, brief phrase in their Delphan dialect that sounds to Laurent like an unintelligible complaint before glancing over to them in mild embarrassment. Colette lets out a sharp laugh. 

“My boy is so rude,” she says without sympathy. “We need some supplies anyways, and I’m sure you’d both be happy to relax and get away from traps and shrews for half a day. Damen and I can meet you at the pub for lunch in the afternoon.”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Damen says with a grin, despite the strained look Laurent gives him that he’s trying not to let the others see. It’s one thing to be invited out to wander the northern Veretian countryside, doing relatively little to help with their research other than keep watch over belongings and raise his eyebrows at rodents Damen finds particularly exceptional. It’s another thing to be forced to spend a whole morning with minimal cell service and a boy he doesn’t know, in a tiny, boring village he’s never been to. He purses his lips in a way that he hopes Damen can recognize as an admonishment to be fully expressed later, but nods his head at Colette. She cheers in her victory and scoops beans onto her plate. 

Damen gives him a kiss when they all bundle out of the station, just before their two groups part ways. It’s chaste and dry, and he murmurs thanks into Laurent’s hairline when he kisses his forehead too. Laurent huffs into his scarf instead of answering, but pauses to surreptitiously watch his boyfriend’s butt in his well-fitting hiking pants as they start down the trail to the trap sites. Gabriel is looking down at his phone when Laurent turns around to the road in the direction of the village.

“You get service out here?” he asks. Gabriel is startled out of concentration and quickly shoves his phone in his pocket. 

“No, I –” Gabriel starts, eyes wide like he’s scrambling for an excuse for some sort of misdemeanour. What kids must have on their phones these days, Laurent thinks, barely managing to keep the wry amusement off his face as he starts down the dirt road. He hears Gabriel shuffle to catch up.

The walk to the village is nothing special, they’re just retracing the path they took on the drive into the parks, and turning North when they meet a slightly larger, paved one-lane road. They walk on the soft dirt and gravel beside the asphalt, and pass by quite a few sheep, who stop grazing only to give them suspicious looks. Gabriel stops to take a photo of a large hornbeam standing in the middle of a pasture, decked in full autumn colour, and Laurent tells him what kind of tree it is when he asks. 

They have to move onto the actual road when it starts being closely lined with low stone walls, ones that look like they were shoddily constructed centuries ago but have nevertheless held their ground. Only two cars and a truck have to slow down to pass them as they get closer and closer to some sort of main town, and they have to dart across a narrow bridge before some idiot in a low-bearing sports car runs them over. It would make Laurent laugh if he weren’t mostly concerned with being charged with Gabriel’s safety; he wishes Damen was here, just Damen and no one else. Laurent’s reminded of Nicaise’s accusations of dullness when he thinks about how exciting it would be to go somewhere and do something new with Damen, instead of just getting lunch on campus and dropped off at work. Something invigorating that they could share together, something easy and amusing between them. There’s undeniably a relief in routine, but no one can resist the appeal of adventure.

Laurent has to get a grip on himself before he lets Gabriel get run over, though, because then he’d have no choice but to let Colette murder him. 

The road eventually leads into the village. It’s very quaint, lined with old plaster houses and the odd larger building nestled in between. Signs dangle from posts above the more prominent doorways, pub and post office being the only visible ones from the central square they finally stop at. There’s a fountain in the middle of a brick mosaic on the ground, inactive for the colder weather and decorated with wreaths instead of flowing with water. Gabriel sighs and sits down on the edge of its basin like it’s the only natural option; Laurent supposes that they did just walk a fair distance from the field station.

A minute after silently refusing to sit on the fountain ledge, hands shoved deep in his pockets, Laurent nods to himself and announces: “I’m going to check some things out.” Gabriel looks up from his phone and Laurent makes a decision. “I’ll be back,” he says, striding off without waiting for the kid. He gets to the door of the post office before darting a glance back to the fountain, but Gabriel’s still sitting there, immersed in his phone screen again. Laurent represses all ridiculous visions of kidnapping and pushes inside the building. 

It turns out that the post office contains more features of a corner store than anything. Laurent meets eyes briefly with the clerk behind the counter in that way which acknowledges that they both know Laurent is an outsider, before the old man scrunches his lips up under his bushy moustache and returns to his newspaper. Laurent ducks into the first aisle. 

Colette had given him a short list of items that he’s pretty sure they don’t actually need, the first of which is a packet of bouillon cubes, followed by two different kinds of chocolate bars. It’s painfully obvious that the “supply run” was a lie, but Laurent can’t figure out what her true intentions were behind sending them off this morning, other than making her son socialize with a relatively unfamiliar adult. Laurent is stubborn, however, and will buy the items purely out of determination and annoyance, if nothing else. 

His phone alerts him of a text as he peruses the candy section. It’s Nicaise again, because who else would be texting him, but it’s just a picture that won’t load and no accompanying text. Laurent attempts to write something back for explanation but even that won’t send, so he shoves his phone back in his pocket and picks up two of the closest chocolate bars with little care. The unreadable message does remind him of Nicaise’s earlier request for a souvenir, so after grabbing the first bouillon packet he finds, he stalks over to the limited selection of knickknacks. Laurent’s surprised to find even this much in a small village post office, but he supposes that there must be at least some traffic through town, if only from the researchers that frequent the field station. 

There’s a small basket on an upper shelf that catches Laurent’s eye, filled with little flat shapes woven out of reeds, only slightly bigger than a square-inch or so in size. The reeds are twisted intricately around themselves and held tightly in place with glue, and each shape is adorned with a tiny fabric flower stuck through the centre. It’s such an inarticulately modest item – so unlike the mass-produced plastic souvenir keychains dangling nearby – that it touches something inside Laurent’s chest with a delicacy and gentleness that he’d forgotten he could feel since he came back across the border. Before he can think too much about it, he picks out two somewhat triangular shapes; a yellow flower for Nicaise, and a purple one for Damen.

The clerk takes his slow time folding up his newspaper when Laurent sets his haul on the cracking linoleum countertop, and then painstakingly punches in the price of each item into a calculator. Laurent’s deeply relieved that he brought enough Veretian cash with him, and his shoulders jump a little when the mechanical cash register is noisily keyed open, curved trays of coins gleaming under the old man’s fingers. The clerk hums gruffly to himself as he writes out a receipt by hand on carbon paper, and then pulls a brown paper bag out from under the counter. Before he places the reed shapes on top of Laurent’s other purchases, he picks one up by the edge between his thumb and forefinger and waves it a little in front of his face.

“You know these’re made by Madame Bisset? The house on the river?” he asks, and Laurent’s not sure whether this man expects him to have to admit that he has no prior knowledge of the town’s residents. Laurent raises his eyebrows and makes a small noise of polite curiosity instead. The old man huffs and nods his head. “She has gardens, you will see them.” He lifts a knobbly finger to point in some vague direction over his shoulder, indicating through the wall where presumably Mme. Bisset’s gardens lie. The clerk drops the reed shapes into the bag along with Laurent’s copy of the receipt, and neatly folds down the bag top with arthritic fingers. He scrunches his lips under his moustache again and waves a hand at Laurent as if ushering him spiritually out the door. 

Gabriel is still sat on the fountain when Laurent emerges from the post office, paper bag clutched in his hand. He’s off his phone for once, staring out down the road in the other direction with his hands in his lap, backpack open at his feet and water bottle set down next to it. He isn’t expecting the smile on Gabriel’s face when he turns his head at Laurent’s approach, and maybe it’s that surprise that makes Laurent stop a couple of feet away, gesture down the road, and ask: “Do you want to see some gardens?”

They follow the road until it turns into a small path that leads down to the river, a narrow but rushing thing, only a couple metres wide. The garden itself is somewhat self-contained; the bare bones of pruned rose bushes form a rectangular perimeter around browning shrubs and moist but empty patches of soil where bulbs and annuals must be in more flourishing seasons. The river itself is indeed lined with reeds, and directly across from the garden is a small white cottage with a grass roof, presumably belonging to Mme. Bisset.

Gabriel makes no complaint about the autumnal state of the garden as they enter through a slightly warped wrought-iron gate in a gap in the roses, and turn down a little gravel path. He seems different somehow than the day before, as if perpetually on the edge of something. Laurent wonders what exactly it is he should be bracing himself for until Gabriel finally stops walking. Laurent, a step ahead now, turns to him with no small amount of hesitation.

“What’s it like to be married to a man?” Gabriel’s hands are all bunched up in his coat pockets and his brow is furrowed, but his expression isn’t accusatory or sickened; it’s something more curious, and – Laurent suddenly can’t stop himself from making a ridiculous face before he starts laughing, mostly out of relief. Gabriel’s cheeks redden and Laurent fights to shift his laughter into coughs, or something, anything else, because the kid shouldn’t be made to feel embarrassed by this, it’s only natural –

“We’re, um,” Laurent attempts, huffing out a last breath of amusement. “We’re not married.” He’d pull his ringless hand out of his pocket if he was that sort of person. “Damen and I – we’ve been together for a while, but, yeah. We’re not.” 

Gabriel’s gaze has settled firmly on his own shoes, and the way his hair flops over his forehead reminds Laurent of Damen a little. He can’t let this end here, he thinks; it feels abruptly imperative for Laurent to let Gabriel know that whatever he must be thinking right now, that it’s okay. Laurent steps forward, containing a sympathetic sigh.

Laurent at first wants to say, “It feels like how any couple feels to be together,” but this immediately feels inadequate. Gabriel’s only sixteen, he’s never been in love with anyone, let alone another guy, and Laurent knows he himself would be severely unimpressed with that answer were he in Gabriel’s shoes. He could say “It feels like breathing, after a long time of not being able to,” but that’s too vague and sappy, and even less helpful. Laurent wonders when exactly he started feeling like he needed to protect this kid, to support him.

“It’s nice,” Laurent settles on eventually, his tone sincere. Gabriel lifts his head, and eyes Laurent with a not unreasonable amount of polite skepticism. Laurent doubles down. “It’s just . . . it’s one of the nicest things I have. I don’t know what else to say.” Laurent shrugs as if he hasn’t just admitted something he would never have thought to utter under any circumstance.

Gabriel stares at Laurent for a long time, absentmindedly biting down on his lip, eyes flickering between Laurent’s own as if fully dissecting and scrutinizing this answer. He finally nods, a small smile disappearing beneath the high collar of his coat when he dips his chin down again. They begin walking again, and Laurent’s caught up in inspecting the branch of what he thinks is a miniature grey sallow when he hears, only just discernible over the breeze that’s picked up, a quiet ‘ _okay_.’

# 

The pub hadn’t been too busy when they’d arrived there, and Colette and Damen had already commandeered a table by a window for all four of them. As usual, Colette and Damen had kept up most of the conversation as they’d eaten the rich pub fare, full of potatoes and hot water crust pastry and hunks of gravy-covered game and vegetables. Colette had made grabby hands when she’d noticed Laurent’s paper bag, and had pulled out the chocolate bars and stock packet with exuberance, bringing them up to her face and sniffing deeply, making Damen laugh. She’d handed the bag back to Laurent without comment on the other contents, before pouncing on Gabriel and interrogating him about his morning.

It’s Damen who suggests that they split ways outside of the pub, Colette and Gabriel taking the direct route back by themselves, with the excuse that he wanted to see more of the town. Laurent hadn’t questioned it when Damen had steered him down a side street that quickly turned into another shoddily paved, and then a dirt path, one that skirted narrowly between two farm fields.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Laurent asks, even though he’s fairly sure of the answer.

“Nope!” says Damen cheerily, letting go of Laurent’s hand in favour of wrapping his arm around his shoulder. It makes walking awkward, but they weren’t rushing anyway. It would take great effort to get Laurent to admit that he wants to stop right where they are so he can feel Damen’s embrace properly, wrap his arms around Damen’s middle and close his eyes and just breath in the scent of him. The longing from this morning comes back in an aching way, to be with Damen and just _do_ things.

The path takes some twists and turns; Laurent thinks they’re going vaguely South-East, the right direction for the parks and the field station, but for once he doesn’t really care if they make it back this way. The slight wind from this morning has barely picked up, only enough to make the field grass whisper and the messy hedgerows on either side dip into their path. The clouds overhead are shifting too, ever so slowly revealing dainty spots of blue.

“How was your morning,” Damen asks softly, a gentle rumble. Laurent takes a couple steps with his eyes closed, breathing in, guided by Damen’s arm across his back.

“Good,” he says eventually, opening his eyes. “We saw a garden. Oh–!” Laurent stops abruptly to open his bag to get the reed triangles. Laurent hands them to Damen without hesitation, and Damen hunches over them slightly, delicately pushing them around on his big outstretched palm with the tip of his pinky finger.

“They’re so detailed,” Damen says in quiet awe. Laurent bends his head over Damen’s hand too, to get another look at them. “Is this a little rose?”

“No, it's cloth,” Laurent replies on instinct, a smirk playing on his lips. Damen glances up in exasperation and rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah, yeah. Okay, smart guy,” he says with a smile, then seems to waver. “Can I . . . Is one for me? Or –”

“The purple,” says Laurent, indicating with a finger. “The other’s for Nicaise.”

Damen makes a silly face out of his grin. “You got me matching whatsits with your volunteer? I don't know if I should be touched, or worried – Are you suggesting something?” Damen only laughs like the traitor he is when Laurent snatches both the reed shapes from his hand and starts to stomp off down the path, face burning. “Are you setting us up? Laurent, I need to know!” 

Laurent lets Damen catch up with him but doesn't turn his gaze away from the middle distance of the path in front of him. It’s like he can feel Damen's smile from here.

“It really is charming, and very thoughtful, Laurent. Thank you,” Damen says earnestly. Laurent purses his lips and only relents when Damen hooks his arm through Laurent’s, soft hand wrapping around the crook of Laurent’s elbow. The big brute sneaks a kiss onto Laurent’s ear, too, and he can’t help but think about Gabriel’s question in the face of such adoring devotion. Part of him wants to tell Damen about it, say what his answer was and hear Damen’s in return, but the right words are hard to find. It seems to sit much better in his chest as just a brief, impactful conversation between a slowly healing man and a curious kid; not anything risky to say, but shared in such confidence that it would be wrong to divulge. A sweet, secret bloom witnessed only by the sky and the flower itself.

Laurent only shakes his head when Damen asks what he’s thinking about to develop such a ponderous expression; let the night-blooming cereus live in peace. 

They happen upon an open gate to their left only a couple minutes later. It’s an unobtrusive thing, wooden, with rusty hinges, and surrounded by close, overgrown bushes. They only need the briefest of glances at each other to agree that they’re going through, possible trespassing be damned.

The bushes form a high wall surrounding them, even taller than Damen, with little bits of scaled conifer branches jutting through from foliage behind, and the path soon becomes so narrow that they have to put hands up to their faces to push them away. 

“I think we’re just going to find more trees, Damen,” Laurent says uneasily after some time, briefly touching a hand to Damen’s back before shielding himself from another branch. It brushes his hair back instead; each leaf and tendril is so close now that it feels like they’re stroking across his arms and shoulders and thighs, neverending.

“There’s still a path, isn’t there?” says Damen, but Laurent’s not sure if he really wants to go any further, his senses are ramping up and he needs something to stop, and – 

They emerge quite quickly into a sudden clearing. The conifers form a loose perimeter around a patch of overgrown grass, with some hardy wildflowers that haven’t yet died off, but the most surprising thing are the remains of a tiny stone house in the middle of the meadow. Most of its roof has caved in, and the tops of each of the walls are broken and weathered. There are scraggly branches of brambles wrapped all around the end still standing, twining up along the cracks in the stone and sending thorny loops through the opening where a window used to be. Laurent notices broken pieces of wood scattered around the grass, some partially burnt. 

They stand there in shocked silence for a moment, until Damen reaches over to hold Laurent’s hand, and it spurs them into a slow, hesitant sort of action. As if unable to stare too long at the decay of the house, Laurent instead watches the way the grass bends under each of his footsteps, taking care to avoid any of the flowers. Damen reaches the closest wall first, and places a hand on the rough and grit of the stones, stroking some of the moss starting to grow with the tips of his fingers. There’s such a feeling of peace surrounding them, but it feels weird to find it in amongst a deteriorating building as the little plot of land is gradually reclaimed by nature. 

After wandering slowly around the house, Damen cautiously steps over the lowest part of the outside wall, and braces the hand holding Laurent’s so that he can step carefully inside after him. There’s a single inside wall with a doorway but no door, which even Laurent has to duck his head for to go under. This half of the house has the highest remaining walls, but they have significant char marks streaking along them, still uncomfortably visible through the dim light let in through a large hole in the roof.

“Damen, the beams are all burnt,” Laurent says, the words ‘ _be careful_ ’ afraid to leave his tongue. Laurent steps closer to Damen instead, fitting his hip up to Damen’s and glancing down around the wooden slats of the floor, burnt through to the ground. It’s only when Damen’s arm wraps around him again to pull him close that Laurent looks up, and then does a double take. 

The chill autumn light is filtering so precisely and delicately through the leaves of the brambles that cradle the skeleton of the structure that it’s impossible to think of any word other than _beautiful_. The vision holds both of them in such rapture; just as the leaves sway fluidly with the breeze so do they, it feels like. A thorn on one of the branches catches a leaf belonging to its neighbour, and they stick together for a moment until the next breeze blows them apart again, and Laurent thinks so desperately and abruptly of how this serenity has always been here, in one form or another, waiting for Laurent to come back just to show him how nice it could be. In the idyllic hush, Laurent imagines his life leading up to this liminal moment in time, and then, with a smile, what it could be like to carry on after.

He finally shifts his gaze back to Damen’s upturned face, and steadies himself with a hand on Damen’s back to stretch up to his cheek. Laurent places a soft kiss there once, and then again on the velvet of Damen’s lips when, naturally, he turns his head towards Laurent. 

#

The last day of field work carries on as before, tramping along dirt paths and collecting data. Something yesterday must have changed within Gabriel; as long as they’re left alone together, he’s quietly voicing more questions to Laurent, framed with genuinely curious expressions. 

“When did you know what you wanted to do? Like, with your life?” he asks just before noon, the sun beginning to peek through the morning clouds. Laurent internally flounders for a second to find the right words, and eventually says something about finding a subject he was interested in and sticking with it for as long as he liked doing it. 

“How are you so confident? You always seem so sure of yourself,” he asks, just after snapping a twig from a spindle bush and twisting it in his fingers. Laurent bites down on a smile and says it’s all practice and mostly acting. He’s not sure whether any of this advice is really helpful; Laurent doesn’t feel qualified on any of these matters, but maybe that’s exactly why his answers are most meaningful to someone like Gabriel. There’s no reason to feed him false information about how to succeed in life, and similarly no harm in being honest. It’s kind of nice to be asked, trusted like this, too.

Just before they’re due to walk back to the station for the last time, Laurent gives Gabriel his number to text if he ever needs. It should feel strange, probably, to voluntarily offer this channel of access to himself, but instead it feels right. The more he thinks about it, the more Gabriel starts to seem kind of like what Laurent would’ve been like, if things had been different. Maybe, in the way that accepting Nicaise had been, this could be good for both of them. 

After dinner, lying in bed together, Damen layers Laurent’s neck and collarbones and chest in hundreds of tiny kisses, propped on his elbows, bent close over his work. Laurent shivers when Damen’s exhales get too close to his nipples, but otherwise remains silent and still, hand clasped loosely around one of Damen’s forearms, nails scratching through the hair there every so often. They’re packing up and going to Arles in the morning, culminating the research trip in the mammal collections there, and Laurent will take nearly every distraction he can get tonight to get his mind off of the one place that he’s so afraid will finally be the death of his carefully reconstructed life. 

Damen mumbles something in Akielon into the crease of Laurent’s neck and shoulder to interrupt that thought, and traces the tip of his nose lightly up the tendon in Laurent’s neck to settle on his cheek, placing a soft kiss onto his jaw. His affections eventually urge Laurent into heavy, dreamless sleep.

Laurent takes the back seat again the next morning, leaning his elbow on the rest in the door and crossing his legs so that he ends up nearly plastered into the corner. Gabriel is in the other back seat, angled so that his phone screen is turned away from any eyes but his, and despite the amiability developing between them – or maybe because of it – Laurent levels his uninterrupted glare at the view out the window for the entirety of the car ride into Arles.

Farmland quickly gives way into suburbs, which they pass by in a breeze on the express overpass directly into the heart of the city. There’s a mess of cars and infrastructure all over, building their way out of the scars of many cycles of industrial booms and manufacturing peaks. High rises and glass skyscrapers slot in beside the ashy stone faces of the old brick and older stone buildings, nouveau classical architecture from the various resurgences of style bridging the aesthetic gap. Laurent wonders acerbically how many times the limestone has been washed in soot and coal smoke and dust, then cleaned to spotlessness only to be layered all over again in a decade. The history of this city has never been a stainless one.

Colette gives instructions to Damen about a colleague who will store their bags for them when she drops him and Laurent off in front of the museum. She’s barely pulled over, but she and Gabriel are going to return the car to the rental branch in the city before meeting back up in the collections; it’s a circuitous plan, and not one that Laurent would’ve made, but he’s arrested from these thoughts when a car blares its horn at them, pulling dangerously out into the other lane to get around Colette’s bumper. He jumps next to Damen, even from the relative safety of the sidewalk, and Colette gives a short wave to them across the lap of a wide-eyed Gabriel in the passenger seat, before driving off. Damen squints down the street after them for a moment, absentmindedly wringing his hands in front of his stomach before he looks back at Laurent. 

“Want me to carry your bag too?” he asks with a toothy grin, biceps already flexing as he hoists the shoulder strap on his own duffel bag. Laurent accepts the offer, with hopefully a minimum of blushing.

Laurent remembers going to the Muséum National with his whole family only once, as a young child. Auguste had held his hand and dragged him around the exhibits, and he can’t remember much except for the way he’d skinned his knees on the floor when he’d tripped while Auguste pulled him along, and the way the cool, smooth marble of one of the walls had felt under his small hand. His uncle had taken him back here much later on, only a couple years before Laurent had excommunicated himself to Marlas. The monster had preferred the Chastillon museum, but had still left his mark on this one; a large donation had procured the name of a fancy new reading room in the South Wing before he’d finally bit the dust. 

Immediately detouring to the staff area to leave their bags with Colette’s friend is good, though. Holding Damen’s hand through the halls behind all the exhibits is good too, and so is finding a small window that looks out from the office mezzanine floor onto a view solely comprised of a giant horse chestnut and its autumn leaves. Laurent runs his fingers over the rough texture of the stone sill, and waits for Damen to finish his conversation, his amiable laugh floating through the open doorway of the office. They have some time to waste before Colette comes back and takes them into the collections, so he pulls up a map of the museum on his phone, seeing how he can avoid the worst parts of this place.

The staff member deposits them at one end of the large second floor atrium. Damen raises his eyebrows at Laurent, as if to ask ‘ _do you know where you want to go?_ ’ 

They end up in the hall of minerals. Laurent had had to avert his gaze from the entrance to the South Wing and the big plaque of donor names outside it as they passed by, but it’s almost heartening to know that keeping his eyes on the entrance to a quiet world of rocks is probably the easiest method of ignoring his traumas he’s managed in the past couple years. 

The hall itself is bathed in a soft, indirect light from the tall windows along the length of it, and there’s only a couple other patrons wandering around the low, waist-height displays; they left early morning, so the usual crowds haven’t had time to accumulate. Damen swings his hand loosely by his side in passive invitation but Laurent crosses his arms instead, ever the contrarian despite holding hands through the whole rest of the building. 

He and Damen start their trek past long displays of precious gems, quartzes veined with gold, skull-sized hunks of amethyst, and deep red fluorite set in complex rock matrix. A large sphere of exquisitely smooth, sanded puddingstone sits on a plinth at the end of a row, surrounded by other impressive conglomerates. Laurent doesn’t really know much about rocks, and he assumes that Damen doesn’t either, but that doesn’t stop them from pointing quietly to sheets of paper thin muscovite, and a whole case of rust-coloured desert roses.

Damen ponders a cut and polished gem of cubic zirconia, and whispers “Looks like a diamond,” in Laurent’s ear. Laurent peers through the glass at it and says “Yeah, but without the artificial inflation and war.” He regrets it a little when he sees the way Damen’s eyebrows bunch in concern, so he points to the next cabinet, which holds a variety of bismuth crystals in all their strange rectangular spirals.

“These are better anyway. And look, they’re like you,” Laurent says, pointer finger hovering over the description placard where the chemical formula ‘Bi’ is bolded in big font. Damen bursts out a laugh, too loud for the quiet hall they’re in, but Laurent’s mouth twitches with the containment of his own smile nonetheless. 

There are two separate rooms at the end of the general exhibit hall, and they pull aside a thick curtain to go into the first one: a dark room for displaying specimens under ultraviolet light. There’s no one else in here, thankfully; Laurent had been starting to rub at his temple from the family with small children beginning to run around the exhibit, so the warm, still darkness of this room is immensely welcome. He thinks briefly about finding a water fountain before Colette finds them, and then goes to join Damen by the leftmost set of glowing rocks, hooking his finger with one of Damen’s.

In the dark, looking at all the calcite and hackmanite, benitoite and fluorapatite shining wonderful colours under the UV rays, Laurent thinks that this isn’t so bad. He’s back in this city that he grew to detest, but the knowledge that he doesn’t have to live here anymore, that he can just go back to Marlas and choose to surround himself with things he likes – that’s what lifts a certain weight off his chest. The power that Arles had held over him truly wanes now that he’s had time away to flourish under his own light; he can see how impotent and false it had been all along.

The other separate room holds what the museum considers to be more valuable treasures than the rest of their rock collection, and when faced with the amping up of Damen’s general enthusiasm Laurent can admit that they might be right. A staggeringly huge fusion of shiny golden cubes turns out to be raw, natural pyrite, and a bubbling mass of dark green orbs melted together is elegant, botryoidal malachite. There are less pretty meteorites too, and a display of all the different colours of diamonds, but Laurent and Damen come to the last two specimens and decide unanimously that these are their favourites. 

A jagged cleave of shiny, jet black obsidian, chipped into the shape of a hefty prehistoric tool sits primly next to the almost sparkling, fist-sized lump of opalized fossil vertebra. Laurent meets Damen’s eyes, and with another, but much more hushed laugh, Damen leans over to kiss Laurent’s forehead before resting his cheek on top of Laurent’s head altogether.

#

It’s quiet when they get home, and although Laurent just wants to collapse on the couch, that would mean sitting down again, and after a long train ride home it’s almost better to just keep standing. He ends up hovering in the kitchen while Damen heats up polenta and greens for their late dinner; they eat it at the dining table only because Damen insists they’re not heathens, and more likely because he doesn’t want to get crumbs in their bed. 

When they do finally submit to the weariness of travelling, at the end of an already tiring week, Laurent finds that he’s not quite ready for sleep, and so as soon as Damen gets into his side of the bed, Laurent reaches over to tug him by the shirt, insinuating himself underneath Damen’s chest. He’s met with a look that he doesn’t pay attention to, just closing his eyes and kissing blindly, and loosens his grip on the shirt to wrap his hand around Damen’s neck when they sink into each other, as if finally letting their whole mass curve into the mattress.

The kissing is soft and familiar, in the same way that Laurent’s legs part to wrap around Damen’s hips. Not a short while later, the impetus arises to shed some of their clothes, fetch some lube from the nightstand, and then Damen is running slick fingers down Laurent’s cock, pushing slowly into him, his breathy exhales the only sound in the room. Laurent loses time for a bit, with Damen licking at the divots in his throat and collar bones, and spreading his fingers deliciously around Laurent’s rim. He comes back to the surface when Damen rises up to kiss him on the cheek, eyelashes fluttering, and leans to get a condom from somewhere.

He would have thought it impossible to be so intimate in the same day as visiting Arles, but it turns out Laurent can brave a lot more than expected after all. He’ll never go back to Chastillon, he thinks firmly, but then Damen is cupping his ribcage and sliding his full length inside him, and all Laurent can do is moan quietly. Damen buries his face into Laurent’s neck to stifle wet gasps, but they’re both barely moving, fingers clutching to cheeks only to grasp hands and press them into the pillow. Damen eventually slides a hand down under the small of Laurent’s back to gently angle his hips, and then Laurent feels so much _more_ , and all of it is so good, as good as it’s always been when it’s with Damen. It’s palpable even outside of sex how much Damen loves him, supports him, challenges him, encourages him to breathe.

The keening noise Laurent makes next desperately tries to turn itself into words, but he only now realizes that he’s crying. It’s nothing bad, he thinks, just an overwhelming amount of happiness, emotion, physical pleasure. Despite the wet tangle of sounds in his throat Laurent sets his lips next to Damen’s ear, reduced to a soft, vulnerable voice that can only tell him how good it feels, how much he adores him, like nothing else. Laurent reassures himself with the words too, and he feels a deep grip in his heart made only out of light and leaves: they could be boring as all hell together and never do anything fun for as long as they live, but their relationship, their _love_ will never be stagnant. Damen is not immune, never immune to Laurent’s voice, his hips canting exquisitely into Laurent before lifting his head to deliver a kiss like his life depends on it, hard on Laurent’s lips, but then over his cheeks where the tears are, down his neck until Laurent’s breath hitches again, which really doesn’t take long. By the time he gets back to Laurent’s lips, Damen has tears in his eyes too, dark cheeks rubescent with exertion and affection. 

“Laurent,” Damen says breathlessly, squeezing Laurent’s hand. “My heart,” and it takes a second for Laurent to realize Damen’s calling him that, an endearment so integral and ardent that Laurent feels it burn up and through his own chest, more tears pricking at his eyes.

“ _Yes_ ,” Laurent replies, with naught an ounce of the usual impatience, sarcasm, or self-doubt that always cling in one combination or another to his words. This assent is completely and utterly honest, and he lets himself bask in every slow movement of their connection, his sweaty hand clinging desperately to Damen’s.

As it’s becoming increasingly obvious, Laurent never wants anything to end when he’s with Damen, especially when his mind is finally relaxed and languid, but ultimately Damen comes, the heavenly slow pace of his thrusts increasing suddenly in jolts until he stills, eyes clenched shut and mouth panting open. Laurent, still achingly hard but sufficiently distracted, blearily thinks of the full condom when Damen remains in Laurent, only bending his knees and hiking Laurent’s pelvis more firmly into his lap. The position is comfortably snug where they’re joined, but spacious above, only Damen’s head hanging low into the gap between them. Laurent’s eyes are barely open now, lashes still wet but helpless to look anywhere other than Damen’s divine face, gazing back at him after he drops a hot kiss on Laurent’s nipple and runs both hands down his flanks and over his stomach, dragging through the hair to Laurent’s cock. Damen starts working him off with his hand, precise and firm strokes slow enough to wring agonizing noises out of Laurent, his back arching with each one. He feels worshipped like this, but in a terribly human way, nothing so public and unreachable as to be on a pedestal, but more like receiving a declaration of loyalty, a willing fealty that Laurent can keep like treasure in a sanctum.

Laurent belatedly realizes his hand is still clasped with Damen’s, fingers still messily interlocked, when he lifts it to touch Damen’s cheek, where a couple tears have slipped down. Damen releases their grip to kiss Laurent’s palm and when Damen rubs his other thumb over the head of Laurent’s cock on an upstroke, Laurent dips his own thumb into Damen’s mouth. There’s too much pressure building inside from the all-consuming, constant touch for him to attempt to form more praise than ‘ _Damen – yes – that –_ ’ but it’s understood all the same.

In a whisper paired with another kiss to the inside of Laurent’s wrist, Damen says “I know, I’ve got you,” and this, combined with a shift of Damen’s hips and the rasp of the hair on Damen’s belly against the underside of Laurent’s cock is what tips him over, not fast or excruciating, but eternally intermediate. He doesn’t have to fight to keep his eyes open; the whole thing is just so gentle, and Damen is so bright, his smile a glimmer behind the tears caught in Laurent’s lashes. 

Laurent’s legs shake when Damen pulls out, smoothing a broad, steady hand along the back of Laurent’s thigh. Laurent watches his face carefully as Damen ties off the condom and swings his feet off the side of the bed; his expression is tiredly neutral, as if everything is exactly the way it should be, but before he can leave Laurent sits up, hip cracking when he suddenly swings his legs around. He grabs Damen around the shoulders, slightly sticky with sweat, and tucks his nose into Damen’s neck. 

“I’m –” Laurent starts. He lets out and takes in a quick breath, still trying to catch it back; his knee is squishing into the meat of Damen’s thigh and Laurent absentmindedly wishes he could straddle them again. “Damen –” but then his voice stalls, can’t get the right words out. Damen huffs a laugh.

“No, _I’m_ Damen,” he replies, and Laurent has no choice but to gasp out a laugh and pull back. His heart is going to burst out of his chest any minute now, but despite the urgency he still has time to ponder Damen’s kind, dark face, the way he holds Laurent like a solid substance. How Laurent proved so much to himself on this one trip, how Damen has managed to introduce just the right sort of determination into his life, how much Laurent –

“Love you,” says Laurent, a little hoarse, wishing he’d cleared his throat properly first, but Damen smiles nevertheless, and Laurent lets the grin wash over him, finally settling into place.

#

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at brigitttt (personal) and/or brigittttoo (side with writing), and newly on twitter @brigitttt_ . Comments are much appreciated, thank you for reading!


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